Moroccan public broadcaster chooses EVS for news production

Moroccan broadcaster SNRT (Société Nationale de Radiodiffusion et de Télévision) has contracted EVS to deliver a new, fully-centralised HD news production infrastructure.

With EVS’ XS3 live media servers at its core, the news production workflow will be shared by SNRT’s channels to produce current affairs and breaking news programmes. It will let the broadcaster streamline its overall operational costs and create easier shared access to recorded content between SNRT’s channels.

With multiple products integrated together into a single HD workflow at its headquarters in Rabat, the EVS news production infrastructure will enable efficient content ingest, creation, management, editing and playout for SNRT.

“Because we operate ten channels at once, having an intelligent centralized workflow that’s completely interoperable is very important,” said Faiçal Laraichi, CEO of SNRT.

“When you’re producing multiple shows back to back like we do, we need technology that lets our production teams work as quickly and as efficiently as possible.”

For content ingest, the specially-designed news production solution features eight XS3 servers, which give SNRT up to 36 I/O channels in either HD or SD. These are used to ingest multiple feeds which are encoding natively in an XDCAM HD 50 codec as well as playout live broadcast feeds. Servers are linked together with XNet, EVS live media sharing network. This means any content recorded on SNRT’s servers is instantly available to any operators or editors and does so without interrupting media when ingest is in progress.

The rest of the news production solution is a modular workflow made up of multiple EVS technologies – IPDirector, XTAccess, XStore and the Xedio suite including its CleanEdit virtual editing software. The solution allows for simple control of the ingest of live feeds and the import of additional files from ENG operations. With the workflow, SNRT will be able to create to high-res and proxy files at the same time so content is available and accessible for production and editing teams. Once ingested, content can be saved onto the facility’s online central storage and made available for easy media management like metadata attribution or content segregation. Throughout the workflow users can easily browse and preview content wherever it’s saved – whether this is on central storage or the infrastructure’s XS3 servers.

All of this content will be made available to a team of 40 journalists who can benefit from post production processes that are much more time efficient. The integrated solution lets them start editing without needing to transfer any files, begin working on media during ingest and apply graphics or voice overs to content quickly and easily.

Once content creation and management is complete, the XS3 can play it out without media rendering, which means it can be on air within seconds of recording. This can either be done directly by the server or by control triggers from SNRT’s playout automation or newsroom control system (NRCS).

The entire workflow of EVS technology is completely interoperable with SNRT’s third-party systems like its Octopus NRCS, Vizrt graphics systems and Final Cut Pro editing suites.

“We’ve been a customer of EVS’ for a number of years, using their solutions for sports broadcasting on our Arryadia sports channel as well as for live coverage of the Marrakech International Film Festival. Therefore, we know that this technology is the most reliable choice as we move to HD production,” added Faiçal Laraichi.

“This is an important transition and defining moment for us as a broadcaster, so it’s reassuring to know we’ve got the right technical infrastructure behind us.”